Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [220]
“Gene was wired from all the pills he was taking, plus all the extra that Elvis had given him. In fact, he’d been so wired for three days and two nights on speed that he couldn’t sleep.
“We were in Arizona, and it was freezing outside. Elvis was driving the bus, and he gave Gene 500 milligrams of Demerol, a synthetic opiate. Gene took the little white pill and waited to fall asleep. But forty-five minutes later, when he was still stoked to the skies, Elvis gave him another hit. An hour went by, and Gene was still bouncing off the clouds—trying to fix stuff on the bus, working on things under Elvis’s feet—trying to do everything, he was so out of it.
“Finally, Elvis told him, ‘Look, Gene, go back in my bedroom, man, and get some sleep. Those pills will kick in before long.’ So Gene went back in the bedroom, and after a while, Elvis told Billy to go check on him. In the meantime, Gene had opened the window, and a terrible draft had blown in on him. So when Billy tried to wake Gene up and couldn’t—the stuff had finally hit him—he felt Gene’s face, and it was just ice-cold. Gene’s heartbeat had probably slowed down, and his breathing, too. But mostly he was cold from all that air coming in on him.
“Well, Billy just freaked out. It hadn’t been that long since he’d found Junior dead in his bed, and he thought it had happened again. Billy came running back up to the front of the bus, yelling, ‘Elvis! Elvis! I think Gene’s dead! I shouted in his ear and he didn’t move a muscle, and he’s cold to the touch!’ Elvis pulled over to the side of the road real quick, and he had his seat belt on, and he jumped up so fast the seat belt almost cut his damn legs off.
“Of course, we all ran back there, but Gene wasn’t dead. He was just cold from the window being open. He wasn’t coming around, though, that was true, so we got him out and dragged him along the side of the highway. He was okay. He’d just been up for three days, and he had two big hits of Demerol in him. It scared the shit out of Elvis, though. He said, ‘Goddamn, Gene, I ought to kill your ass!’ ”
Two months earlier, while on the film set, Elvis gave an interview to Lloyd Shearer of Parade magazine, in which he mentioned that he often read medical texts and would have liked to become a doctor. He also talked about how males seemed to dislike him when he started out, but that his stint in the army changed that, along with “the fact that there’s never anything about my thinking that I’m a lover or a ladies’ man. I’ve never looked at, or thought of myself, as being a lady-killer or anything like that. And I’ve never shown it, that I know of.” Finally, he talked about friends, saying, it was “important to surround yourself with people who can give you a little happiness.”
Elvis thought he’d found more than that with Priscilla, who was coming for Christmas after all, even though the Beaulieus had never been apart for the holidays.
“At first, I said no,” Ann Beaulieu remembers. “But when I saw how much it meant to her, I finally convinced my husband. It wasn’t easy.”
Vernon and Dee, who now had a home of their own near Graceland, flew to New York’s Idlewild Airport to meet the passenger flying under the name of “Priscilla Fisher.” They accompanied her to Memphis, and then Elvis asked her to wait at his father’s house on Hermitage Road.
“I want to drive her through the gates,” he said. “I want to see her face when she sees Graceland for the first time.”
He had decorated the grounds with a life-size nativity scene and Santa’s prancing reindeer, edging the walkways in blue lights for his song “Blue Christmas.”
“When we drove through those gates and I saw the Christmas lights and glittering decorations on those long white columns,” Priscilla later said, “I thought I was living inside a dream. Except the dream had come true. I had come home with Elvis.”
Elvis and Ann-Margret’s love affair on Viva Las Vegas, in the summer